multimedial exibition
curator: Branka Benčić

The Cinemaniac programme, which has been part of the Pula Film Festival since 2002, resulted from the need to present innovations from the world of art and cinema. Cinemaniac chooses the environment of a gallery which becomes a place where moving images are presented. Within the context of the gallery the pictures from the projector do not only change the environment they are presented in, they also change our way of experiencing art. The projections transform the given environment of the gallery, they engage the architecture they capture and create an ambience of audiovisual illusion, art, science and technology. By creating a new social environment, the exhibition makes topics that address the relation between film and visual arts enter public discourse, it presents recent productions of artistic videos, experimental cinema and multimedia installations.

The 9th Cinemaniac is dedicated to MAFAF, the Film Clubs and Author Amateur Film Festival, which took place between 1965 and 1990 in Pula immediately before the Pula Film Festival. Twenty years after the last MAFAF, this is a try to make the invisible MAFAF history visible with the help of the available documentation and archived footage for the purpose of appropriately contextualizing this festival, valorising its importance and rehabilitating the memory of this interesting manifestation which, according to the number of submitted films and authors present, used to be one of the biggest events when it comes to amateur filmmaking in Yugoslavia.

Cinemaniac places new works into the white cube of the gallery and, by an organic transformation of the MAFAF ideas into the 21st century, by broadening perspectives, retaining an interest for the experimental practice in presenting and working with moving images, brings the work of some of the earlier MAFAF participants, such as Tomo Gotovac, Ivan Faktor or Dan Oki as well as a new generation of visual artists back to Pula.

Informative programme / InVisible MAFAF represents a research platform, a project to be realized in stages and in a number of recognizable presentation styles. The aim is not to create a linear analytical historiographic reconstruction of data, but a model of subjective critical reinterpretation as a fragmentary file of mosaic dana in order to articulate another view, one that is close, yet distanced, temporary and unstable.

Branka Benčić

Author of the concept and curator of the exhibition: Branka Benčić/ associates: Ivica Gunjača and Marko Zdravković Kunac (Pula Film Factory)/Partners: Multimedia Centre Luka, Pula Film Factory, Croatian Film Clubs’ Association, Pula Film Festival